In monthly column The A-to-Z of Trash, bad movie lover Eliza Janssen takes us on an alphabetically-ordered trip through the best bits of the worst films ever. This month, Xanadu is both more and less than the sum of its crazy parts: rollerskating, Gene Kelly, ELO and Greek mythology.
Only the brilliant Karina Longworth, the critic and film historian behind the podcast You Must Remember This, could suggest that 2025 hit Sinners is actually the 1980 film Xanadu in disguise. In a Substack post, she noted that both movies hinge around the establishment of an exciting new club, where the otherworldly power of music and dance transports visitors to bygone eras. She is so smart.
The big difference, of course, is that Sinners is currently enjoying premier placements in critic’s end of year Top 10 lists, whereas Xanadu inspired the creation of the loathsome Golden Raspberry Awards, “celebrating” the worst movies of a given year. I’m sorry, did I see Michael B Jordans bopping around in roller-skates? Does Ryan Coogler’s exhilarating genre mash-up include a late period Gene Kelly? No. And so it’s time to actually “celebrate” the luminous delights of Xanadu, a movie that makes my heart pulse away happily. And, in fact, to a similar beat as Grease 2, which I covered way back in February last year.
Xanadu is one of those bonkers movies weighed down by a very dull, non-bonkers protagonist: Sonny Malone (The Warriors star Michael Beck), an uninspired LA painter and massive whinger. Idly rollerskating around town, his creative block somehow animates the Ancient Greek muse Terpsichore—but you can call her Kira (Olivia Newton-John). The same character basically appeared in 1947’s Down to Earth, with Rita Hayworth’s Terpsichore given a far greater deal of creative control, weirdly enough.
An immortal Manic Pixie Dream Muse, this Kira breathily explains that she and her sisters have “been painted by Michelangelo. Shakespeare’s written sonnets about us. Beethoven’s played music for us.” But tragically, she is destined to never directly do any cool art stuff, fall in love, be human: “We’re not supposed to feel emotion or show any feelings. Muses are just supposed to inspire.” For more of this interesting pathos that actually goes somewhere, watch John Berger’s Ways of Seeing or listen to FKA twigs’ Mary Magdalene.
Another horny dude who made his livelihood off Kira’s free-spirited beauty is Gene Kelly, as lonely clarinet player Danny. This will be Kelly’s final screen role. Danny and Sonny stumble upon a big empty auditorium and are magically encouraged to flip it into a happenin’ disco spot, despite Sonny showing no prior interest in the seedy club promoter lyf. Should they run a classy wartime big band joint, or a coked-up rock and/or roll dive? As a wise spokeswoman for Old El Paso tacos once said: por qué no los dos? In a musical number that is somehow both wildly tacky and inexplicably poignant, the guys imagine both eras’ sounds combining—and it’s here we should talk about Xanadu’s soundtrack.
It’s a fairly clean split between two quite different sorts of sounds. First, there are Olivia Newton-John’s glimmering, schmaltzy love songs: Suddenly, Whenever You’re Away From Me, the title track. And then there are the rollerskate-rink-ready pop songs by Electric Light Orchestra: All Over the World, I’m Alive, and my fave Don’t Walk Away, which scores a dream sequence animated by legendary perv Don Bluth, in which Sonny and Kira transform into flirting birds and fish. The combination is shambolic, to be sure, climaxing in a nutty medley of a finale once the club opens—Olivia Newton-John switching between disco, country and rock get-ups as extras skate madly around her stage, a centrifuge of every sequinned late-70s trend.
Xanadu is the kind of bad movie I can’t bring myself to dislike, and not just because it’s a musical. The thing is sweating for us, desperate to reach the breezy heights of Grease and instead feeling like that one table at a wedding where you plonk all the guests who don’t know anybody else. Gene Kelly? Yeah, sit him with my rollerskating buddies, they might have a good time. And you know what? They do. They have a ball. What they have made is real, and they call it Xanadu.
